From cowan Fri Oct 27 11:53:21 1995 Subject: -gua!spi (was: Incredible!) From: John Cowan To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Lojban List) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 11:53:21 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <199510270659.AAA20716@teal.csn.net> from "Chris Bogart" at Oct 27, 95 00:42:43 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1061 Status: OR Message-ID: la kris. cusku di'e > Guaspi does something similar -- its gismu are monosyllabic but can have > several consonants at the beginning and end; also it counts some liquids and > things as vowels, I think. The use of tones for syntax probably allows some > overlap between cmavo and gismu -- not sure about that though. In -gua!spi, cmavo are C followed by any number of Vs, and gismu are two or more Cs followed by any number of Vs, where (this is the important bit) V includes l, m, n, r. So words needn't be monosyllabic -- "kira" is a word, or potential word -- but are in some sinse "monoochunked". Word separation is easy: all word boundaries are of the form V#C, where # is the boundary. The rule that cmavo begin with just one C is purely conventional: nothing in the language depends on it. There really is no upper limit to either cmavo or gismu in -gua!spi: "gznoerailmanliemournaaaeiiiilllr" is a potential gismu, and you can throw in as many schwas as you like to pronounce it. -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban.